Well I used Panorama Factory which is some trialware I found. But it's really simple. You'll want 2 or 3 rows x all the way around (which is about 6 around using the QVR's from that website link) of photos making sure that the horizon for the pano is in the middle. This will give the best perspective for the airplane relative to the altitude of the ground in retrospect. Just capture them one at time, but what I can't stand about Pano Factory is that all the images must be the same size, a real PIA, so I'm going to find a better pano prog that can use mulit size images. But basically you just screen cap, crop and add to the pano program and most of the good stitching progs will do the auto stitching and blending. You just need to learn that stiching program. Pano Factory took me about 3 minutes to learn, but it's very basic.

I've also learned that you can zoom in / zoom out the QVR before you screen capture. This is AWESOME because you can figure out exactly what zoom you need to be at to make the airplane look in perspective compared to the environment of the image. For instance did you ever notice in some homeade scenes for AFPD that planes look to big or too small compared to the environtment around it? Well you can control that. The only bad part is that it's trial and error and could take you a long time to get it right.

Your finished product needs to be 8192 x 4096. After you create the pano usually you will have some blank space above or below the image. Just resize the image to either 8192 x proportional. Then resize the canvas keeping the image centered. It's ok to have about 10-15% of blank space top or bottom because in the sphere it will be hard to notice. Make sure you do the resize before you convert it with AFPD Installer which will resize it ... but you'll get to to more custom things to it using Photoshop/Fireworks.